Wolfgang Tillmans: Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago

Wolfgang Tillmans is the catalogue of his first survey in American museums, organized in 2006 by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago and the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles.

Russell Ferguson of the Hammer and Dominic Molon of the MCA curated the show. It ran at the MCA from 20 May to 13 August 2006 and at the Hammer from 17 September 2006 to 7 January 2007, then moved to the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington in 2007. The two museums published the catalogue with Yale University Press. It is a 181-page hardcover with a foreword, an introduction by Molon and Ferguson, an artist’s biography and a selected bibliography. Essays by Daniel Birnbaum, Molon, Ferguson, Lane Relyea, Julie Ault and Mark Wigley take up his way of seeing, photoconceptualism, portraiture, abstraction, his installations and the spatial dynamics of the work.

The introduction follows Tillmans from photographs of friends in the early 1990s to still lifes, studies of natural phenomena and abstractions made by experimenting with the photographic process. He won the Turner Prize in 2000, and his work is in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Hammer Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago and Tate.